Problem with the experiment... @smooth, I don't believe this was your intention
You guys need to be careful how you decide to counteract a whale vote for your experiment. If your reputation is high enough it can have some unintended consequences.
I don't think your intention was to censor @jang's and @riskdebonair's posts, and ding his reputation. Not a good thing to be doing for steemit.
In fact if this was going to be a part of the experiment it might have been good to temporarily suspend the reputation system during the experiment so that ordinary users did not have their reputation damaged by flagging to try to balance things.
We need to do something about posts being hidden as though they were bad ASAP. I'll up vote a few to see if I can help, but that means I'm actually up voting things I sometimes might not simply to counteract the hidden effect if possible.
EDIT: For clarification and simplification of math. If a Whale with Steem Power of 1,000,000 up votes a post by 1% that is like up voting the post with 10,000 Steem Power. If a Whale with Steem Power of 3,000,000 FLAGS that post by 1% to counteract the other whale that is 30,000 Steem Power. They not only counteract the whale, but they negate the votes of a bunch of other people as well. Counteracting is only VIABLE if it is 1:1 otherwise it just screws the data up.
Yes, there are a lot of unintended consequences of piss-poor experimentation. And there were also a lot of consequences that were to be expected from this, including exactly what would happen if larger stakeholders withheld their votes and exactly how users would react to being flagged.
We are essentially learning nothing from this.
We already knew that some users could control the entire platform if they wanted to. I want to thank them for vividly reminding us of this.
Unfortunately this is the first time I have felt compelled to jump ship to another platform over some experimental bullshit. I don't really post for the money and the platform isn't all that large. Maybe I should just use medium instead. The conflict I have is that I support crypto decentralization for the enrichment of humanity, but all of these whale games are about control and not allowing free market principles to play out as they should. Opinions are like assholes and everyone has them, but what the fuck is the purpose of invalidating other's work to enrich a community. I am pretty disgusted that 2 posts I had spent almost four hours on with a little over 100 votes COMBINED got flagged because someone didn't think someone else approving of my material. I was looking at maybe a dollar an hour for the time I put in which is really irrelevant because I was 100% boosting, but apparently those posts should only be worth thirty cents each because of one persons opinion. It's pretty fucking annoying.
I agree. The code for the blockchain tells us what the rules are. If there are unforeseen negative consequences, the reasonable response would be to adjust the code. And in that sense most users have agreed that the n^2 algorithm needs to be changed. However, Steemit Inc. decided not to go forward with a more linear curve in the next hard fork.
So, instead of getting an actual change to the code - which would actually resolve some of the major issues with voting/rewards - we get a half-cocked "experiment" by those who don't control the blockchain. It appears to me that one bad decision by Steemit Inc. has simply led to another bad decision by those who are not Steemit Inc. in an attempt to pacify some users who constantly squawk about "not having enough influence." But the solution is not to pile onto bad ideas. The proper solution would be to pressure the powers that be to make the best decisions - not give them an "out" while simultaneously irritating many of the remaining active users on the platform.
I don't understand this either. The whole notion of "everyone needs to be rewarded" isn't a "free market" or even a social media concept. The purpose of this platform regarding content and the purpose of social media in general is to raise certain posts over others based on what is subjectively "good" according to the collective evaluation of the community...or what we call "popularity." Seeking more equal results or essentially punishing those who have put in the work to become "popular" is anti-social (in the social media context).
What this "experiment" is saying is that, if you have done well at creating content and/or networking to build your audience and have consequently attracted larger stakeholders who value your work, you will now be penalized for it. This is not a positive message to send.
In addition, it is telling those larger investors who have actually bought STEEM (which helps all STEEM holders) and powered up in order to have more influence on the platform that their purchase of STEEM was basically a malinvestment. Their influence will now be negated by people who just don't think they should have such influence. This sends exactly the wrong message to investors...the very people who are needed in order to increase the value of all of our holdings.
In other words - it's a shit "experiment"...and I haven't even touched on the arbitrary nature of all of it and the fact that there are apparently no parameters for the "experimentation."
Well I held over 10k steem on this account at one point and I get a whopping 5 SP by being involved in several high volume curation trains and manually up voting. I also hold about 50,000 steem on Poloniex that I will be dumping now because I honestly don't give a fuck about supporting a platform that can't make decisions for the greater good. I never bitched about all the posts I spent way too much time on and got no recognition. I found different areas to write in and as soon as I started regularly hitting any kind of return on my financial AND more importantly massive time investment I get a giant fuck you for it. So in return I guess I'll show them what an empty kingdom feels like. Have fun with the people screenshotting youtube videos because they can't actually create content or the random cellphone shots of what the fuck ever and my personal favorite the bots making 30 to 50 bucks a post. I'll go not make any money and have my content ignored by larger audiences.
Seems copy paste for 2 mints is the time worth to spend in steem .................
Its not often that I agree with @ats-david, but when I do I can admit when I'm right. I mean when he is right..I mean when we share a valid point. yeah that sounds good.
It sure looks like intent to me. I've seen several posts by people who almost never get whale votes flagged. If they wanted to counteract bad whale behavior, they would flag themselves.
Anyone with over 1,000,000 Steem Power I believe is considered a whale. Their experiment is to see how the reward pool would distribute if people with lesser steem power get to vote. It should be closer to what it would be like if there was not a concentration of power.
The problem is they didn't coordinate it and get all whales to agree, so when they see a whale up vote something they down vote it.
That means the experiment is kind of working on rigged data, but that's kind of expected if they didn't plan and get all whales to agree to participate for X amount of time.
The big issue for me is people like @jang caught in the crossfires and his posts hidden like they were spam, abuse, or plagiarism and his reputation likely dinged.
That shouldn't be an acceptable outcome. I consider the concept of Collateral Damage to be an evil one. So if this is what they feel they need to do then they need to have a way to follow behind and repair reputations, and unhide posts that didn't deserve to be hidden.
Hidden posts will skew the results as some people will not even look at them. They'll think it was abusive, NSFW, or something else.
This kind of irresponsibility is what causes the problems in the first place. Compounding it doesn't help.
They also didn't coordinate this with the minnows who have stopped voting, because they know their vote doesn't mean anything. Yours is the most informative post I've seen on this. If I knew my vote mattered, then I'd go vote, but this experiment was poorly thought out, and poorly executed.
Their experiment changes normal vote patterns anyway. I am hesitant to waste my voting power now on a post I want to succeed, because it might just get blasted into oblivion by their Commie-bots. Plus, even people that paid to promote their posts are being downvoted.
Also abit (not sure about others) is downvoting consolidated minnow voting, treating a group of minnows like a single whale.
They should upvote him back to old rep after this is all over. It's a well needed expirement. If it was done last September when I suggested it, it would have saved the platform a lot of heartache
This is the reason why I'm not blogging until the experiment is over. I don't want whales to downvote me and reduce my reputation.
This has been a problem for some time. The real question is when are Dan and Ned going to do something about it?
What do you propose they do? I know Dan has expressed an interest in DOING something about it, but hasn't come up with a way that cannot be exploited/gamed in other ways. So it is easy to say "Do something about it", yet I've yet to see an idea that when extrapolated over time, and thought of in terms of how to game/hack/take advantage of it doesn't have exploitable areas as bad or worse than what we already have. So I think they are willing to fix it. They just don't know how yet.
I had not considered this issue. Thanks for highlighting it!
honestly im just confused. this experiment seems needless, and more harmful than informative.
You're right @soundlegion ! I worked my ass off to write one of my posts and I had a lot of upvotes and 30$ Than in a few minutes it disapeared because of this bullshit ! :/
wow really that is terrible, i really hope it get sorted soon and it stops, dont think its working as they thought. stuff like that shouldnt be happening.
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Mar 13. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $1.18 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Mar 13 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Nice observation! I get both sides to the argument, but it's very unfortunate that it's negatively affecting genuine posts for the sake of a test I would think could be done a bit more elegantly.
From what I can tell things are balancing out though. In the end I wasn't personally negatively affected by the test, but I hope it got the answers folks were looking for.
Waow... I've been hit so many times by this.